Tag Archives for Soluto
Scott Thompson begins his job at Yahoo! today.
Image via CrunchBase
It seems that most of the mainstream press is befuddled about him and exactly what business Yahoo! is trying to be. Is it a media company? Is it a bulletin boards company? Advertising? Mobile? Marketing? No, not search.
It is a company that has a rapidly scalable identity and a huge community of users that it can rapid test ideas on, as it builds off what it used to be and turns into the next big thing.
This makes Yahoo! just like a start-up, and Thompson just like a budding entrepreneur, except he has skillz. Let me boldly proclaim that Thompson’s role as CEO at Yahoo! will move the company in the direction of social, community-centric e-commerce solutions. Watch out, Jack Ma, Yahoo! is coming for you!
Yahoo! is going to become the first huge scale media content company that is actually an e-commerce company. Think of it as a giant tupperware party where content and e-commerce are mashed together to form a new type of selling content, or a live advertising model where product, seller, consumer, and community are all mashed up into one.
Wal-Mart, but with a huge media engine.
Image via CrunchBase
Is there any value to joining LinkedIn? Charlie Spencer asks this in his comments at Inc. magazine, where Marla Tabaka has written a thoughtful post about how to maximize your use of LinkedIn to, in some cases find a job, but in most cases network with others.
Often asked as a question, the query about whether there is any value in a social platform is actually a statement of frustration from people who don’t seem to understand that a social platform like LinkedIn is not a vending machine.
Neither is a business in which employees put in 9 hours of work each day in return for a salary, health benefits, and — this is ironic — access to a vending machine.
When my father would take us to work on the weekends, he definitely had work to do. Yes, there was a vending machine quality to the mission. He had to sort “x” amount of work for ”
Image via Wikipedia
“x” amount of hours to get a “y” result, usually routing trucks to do “hot shot” deliveries of Pepsi to stores that had a sale on Pepsi and lost product faster than they could replenish on a regular route cycle. As a kid, I didn’t pay much attention to that aspect of his work, but I did pay attention to what went on while we were there.
Lots of socializing. My father was a manager. He had to manage other sales personnel, who were also there on the weekend. What I noticed at an early age is that the sales staff at the Pepsi plant were doing more than just fulfilling “x” amounts of work to get a “y” outcome. They were showing up for my dad. They knew he was in a position of influence and could help them with their careers.
These were sales people. They worked by the force of their rhetoric, their logic, and their ability to hustle and solve problems. It was clear that by putting time in for my father, they were also representing themselves as people who could be trusted, who supported his efforts and had enough ambition to see the job through.
Today, when many of us work remotely, and, if you are like me, you work for clients you see face-to-face intermittently, you need to show up for them. That’s why you would go to a platform like LinkedIn, for example.
You can communicate there. You can recommend clients to others there. You can get your work done, and you can get other people’s work done. That was the subject of my radio show talk last night with Soluto’s Tomer Dvir. We are in this game to win, but we want to win with others. We want and need to help others in the dynamic, and chaotically changing structure of capitalism these days.
So when Charlie Spencer writes something like this, let’s pause:
If I’m not in marketing or looking for a job, is there any value in LinkedIn? I’ve joined for the second time, but I now recall why I canceled my first account. I don’t know how to get any value from it.
I’m an IT tech for a medium-sized business. I don’t interact with our external customers or vendors. While I am aware of the current economic issues, we’ve turned the corner and I expect to remain employed here until I retire in a decade or so.
I don’t participate in other social networks, so that may be hindering me. I don’t understand the Barbara’s use of the word ‘conversations’ or how to conduct one. (I have the same problem with my attempts to use Twitter.) Most of my contacts are co-workers. I don’t have a ‘real world’ network.
We are nothing without the network. Networks will be our most significant source for rises in income, new job offers, and the rise of what I will call the Freelance Globalist Population, which will work, not for a corporate entity, but in service to many entities, people and missions.
We need to start learning how to use the network, and to utilize the network to feed ourselves.
There is value to a platform like LinkedIn. Without platforms like this in the real world, the dry and mundane aspect of work kills us. It kills our chances for promotion, and it kills our spirits. Ironically, as I was writing this blog post, Charlie Spencer responded with a comment below his first one, noting that he needed to use platforms to improve his social skills and enhance his real world network.
I hope that works for him. We are certainly of the mind here at Re-Wired that we are nothing without our networks. After all, as we have written before, the new MBA is to manage your business and your team as if you are a social worker.
Nothing in a social web environment exists for the sake of its users alone. Social platforms are not vending machines. They are not vending machines, because you can not, in a digital age, work with the assumption that “x” + “y” = “z”, where “z” is quality of life, and “x” is an input like hours, and “y” is an input like “quality of work.”
We don’t live that way anymore. You cannot put a coin in a slot and get exactly what you want.
You now have to make what you want, and making what you want, creating your vision, starts with starting relationships, building relationships, and becoming partners with people — even complete strangers.
Food for thought: read our latest post on Airbnb and changing your life by changing your networks.
Image by Tomer Dvir via CrunchBase
Today Soluto.com released a new version of its crowdsourced cloud-based IT support network. Soluto is a software program that runs in the background of your computer that helps an IT expert solve any problem you are having in a way that prevents the frustration and the loneliness experienced in the IT help desk industry.
We talked with members of the team in Tel Aviv a few days ago, and here is the radio show, running live now.
The one thing we don’t have right now in the IT profession is a help desk that can be everywhere on every computer, at once.
Tomer Dvir, the CTO of Soluto.com is working with his team to release an update of the social help desk app they created not even one year ago. It’s a way to give thanks, get credit and “socialize” the IT help desk. Dvir says the company wants to create a market for friends helping friends, in order to help the billions of consumers of tech products solve some of their basic — but most frustrating — customer service issues.
The iteration that they release today will allow you to connect socially to experts who know the ins and outs of how your computer, tablet or mobile device work, and you may never have to worry again about the screen freezing, or software hanging up on you.
The point is to make IT help as social and as viral as possible for the billions of people who are your average everyday consumers of tech products.
From their website:
Unless you’re a power-user, you probably don’t know what’s causing the frustrations, those moments where some mysterious process is hogging your PC’s resources. Even if you are a power-user, it can take quite some time to pin-point the causes.
Image via CrunchBase
Today I talked with the CTO and the co-founder of Soluto.com, Ishay Green, and his co-founder and CEO Tomer Dvir. The company, based in Tel Aviv, is getting ready to launch an iteration of their service solution.
Basically, they will offer a free service for the family and friends of early power users of Soluto that allows experts in IT management and solutions, or anyone with any basically great and geeky skills in IT support, use the social web to fix the problem using a very easy to use interface and even crowdsource problems.
The solution could fix a sometimes invisible problem: the products made by Microsoft and Skype are often only really fully understood by the people who make them. You and I don’t care how it works, we just want it to work.
As Ishay said, “I am supposed to be really great at tech, but I have this Mac here, and I’m busting my balls, trying to make it work a certain way.” The companies that make the products are too busy to make fixing any errors easy.
I can’t really reveal the release that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. But I can tell you that Soluto is launching a revolutionary product in their next iteration and it fixes this problem. You should look into how it currently fuctions at www.soluto.com.
I honestly think that Soluto will influence companies as big as Skype or Microsoft to change some of their products. Stay tuned. The radio show will run around December 12.
Soluto CTO Ishay Green points to the 2.5 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid who need tech help, but can't stand the noise
Here is a picture of Ishay Green explaining how Soluto seeks to help the 2.5 billion people who use tech all the time, but who really don’t understand how to fix the problems it has. If you are in tech and can take a look at this, I would love to know what you think of this stage of Soluto’s growth.
